Ebertfest Day 2: Belle, with director Amma Asante

I loved this movie so much when it first came out, I became a bit of an evangelical for it. There were people in my life who I knew would LOVE this movie – and nobody goes to the theatre anymore (grrrr) – so I kept reminding them: Make sure you catch this one. This is one you don’t want to miss. I wrote a whole piece about it here.

One of the real pleasures of the screening of Belle here was that
1. Mitchell had never seen it. And
2. He was not familiar with the story.

One of my favorite things in the world is to “introduce” someone – especially a good friend who loves movies and performance like I do – to something I love, especially if they “go into it cold.” I KNEW he would respond to it. So seeing it vicariously through his eyes was almost as pleasurable as the movie itself.

At one point, he leaned over and whispered to me, gripping my arm, “I swear to God, if anyone hurts this woman …”

He was so invested!

Director Amma Asante was here, and it was so great listening to her talk about her process and her goals for this in the QA afterward, moderated by Chaz Ebert and Rebecca Theodore-Vachon.

One of the things I loved so much was hearing about all of her stylistic choices. She wanted to make a quintessential English costume drama period piece (“Who doesn’t love an English costume drama?” she said. Cosign) and yet use that style to tell the story about a black woman. “Black people weren’t invented in 1957,” she joked.

She shared her “scheme” for the movie. In the first half, where the two young women are on the estate, holed off from the world and protected from reality, Asante used “ice cream colors” – pinks and greens and blues for their dresses – a Utopian world. The rooms were cavernous and the ceilings were high, and these two exquisite young creatures were like perfect tiny dolls posed in those huge spaces. In the second half of the film, as the two women face the world for the first time, in all its complexity and pain and reality, the colors darkened to smoky-greys and purples, the shadows got thicker and foggier – and, my favorite detail, the ceilings were lower! I had felt the effect of those lowered cramped ceilings but hadn’t really clocked it as a “thing.” I got the impact, but hadn’t really noticed it. So in the second half, the two women were basically pushed up against the ceilings in those small London apartments, showing the the growth spurt of the soul – the implicit revolt against the racism and sexism and classism which drenched their society so that they were literally bursting out of the spaces trying to contain them.

These are the kinds of details I absolutely love.

Mitchell and I had an amazing day at the movies.

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